But although the 81-year-old British modern master has been a relentless explorer of new image-making technologies, including multi-camera video work and 3-D photographic constructions for “Time and More, Space and More ...” at Gray Warehouse, it was not “internet’s” assemblage of web-related artmaking that most stuck with him.

“I’ll tell you what,” he said during a wide-ranging interview hours before the opening party for his exhibition, “the best thing in the Museum of Contemporary Art was the little Calder cat,” the 1966 sculpture Cat Mobile on view in the show “Heaven and Earth: Alexander Calder and Jeff Koons.”

“It was marvelous, that cat.”

And while he was here for the opening of his first Chicago gallery show since 2014, Hockney also checked out the Art Institute for some more retrospective art viewing. He spent six hours with curators going through the collection of drawings, including works by Rembrandt, Picasso and Degas, said Paul Gray, a partner in Richard Gray Gallery, which has long represented Hockney in Chicago.

In conversation the artist took time to puckishly tout the health benefits of the cigarettes he continues to smoke, to comment on his emergence as a style icon, to question the value of virtual reality and 3-D films, and to praise Chicago artist Kerry James Marshall.

Most of it was done with a twinkle in his eye and his voice. “I have a sense of humor,” he said. “Laughter is the best medicine. You know why laughter is the best medicine? I was told this. Because when you’re laughing, you have the least fear in your body. That makes sense to me.”

It was all evidence of the relentless curiosity of Hockney, who arose out of the Pop Art movement in the 1960s without being entirely of the movement. In addition to working in, as the artist put it, “any technology that’s about picture making,” including Polaroid collages early on and iPads more recently, he’s written a book, 2001’s “Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters,” suggesting that those painters used lens techniques to cast their subjects’ images onto canvas, resulting in breakthrough realism.

“That’s almost a lifetime of dedication to thinking about seeing,” Gray pointed out.

But all that poking around has also left a body of work that some people, the artist said in an interview with London’s Tate Modern, before his recent major retrospective there, see as “bitty,” as in bits of this, bits of that. He disagrees.

“Well lots of people used to say, ‘Oh, he’s changed again.’ But I always thought, ‘Well, I did this now because I’ve done that.’ I was always finding out things,” he said in Chicago.

Abel Uribe/Chicago Tribune

Artist David Hockney in front of one of his "photographic drawings" at Richard Gray Gallery on Sept. 13, 2018.

Artist David Hockney in front of one of his "photographic drawings" at Richard Gray Gallery on Sept. 13, 2018. (Abel Uribe/Chicago Tribune)

He brought up the oversized “A Bigger Book,” a $2,500 limited-edition retrospective volume published in 2016 by the art house Taschen: “That big book, the great big Taschen book, that made me look back at my work. And I haven’t really looked back. I say, I live in the now. But when we did this book, I realized the book would be marvelous for my work, because every page could be very different. ... I know in the end there will be a David Hockney style because in the end, that’s all it can be.”

The Chicago show, free and open to the public during Gray Warehouse hours, is not the Hockney you might think you know, the paintings of swimming pool scenes in Los Angeles executed decades ago, moist and sunny and fraught with emotional undercurrents.

“It’s so funny that artists become known for something, And even if it’s a relatively modest contribution to their overall career, it becomes ubiquitous,” Gray said. “David really hasn’t made that many paintings of swimming pools. ... And yet that’s what he’s so well known for.”

Gray said that in response to a question about whether he wouldn’t rather have for his gallery a new suite of pool paintings than these more experimental works.

“He’s the epitome of curiosity, which I consider to be one of the strongest markers of intellect,” the art dealer said. “Of course, commercially, one likes to have things that one can sell. But we’ve been in business more than 50 years. And you get a level of confidence that things are going to be fine commercially, which allows you to do whatever you want to do. And I think that’s analogous to the way it is with great artists.

“It’s not that they ever become complacent, but they begin to develop a level of confidence in their own ability that allows them to break out of a mold and not make more of the same.”

The work on display in Chicago is mostly massively scaled, and there is only a small selection of paintings, small, affecting, vibrant self-portraits. Behind them, the video installation “The Four Seasons, Moldgate Woods, 2010-2011” occupies four walls, an array of nine screens per wall, the images on each wall chronicling a deliberate ride down the same bucolic road in England in one of the four seasons.

“We made them because I thought, well, I know video isn’t painting,” Hockney said. “Video brings its time to you. Whereas you bring your time to painting. That can never ever change.”

And beyond that is a gallery filled with what Hockney and Gray bill as “photographic drawings,” works that play with concepts of perspective and point of view in ways the artist sees as groundbreaking or, as he put it, “rather exciting.” It’s a technique you have to see to begin to grasp, and even then it’s a shade disorienting.

“You’re used to the limitations of photography,” said Gray, “and he’s pushing that to the sidelines and saying, ‘Maybe it’s not so limiting.’ ”

For the large-scale 2018 work “Pictures at an Exhibition,” on the wall behind him as he sat and talked, the artist said he took 3-D photographs of people in or near folding chairs set up in front of a suite of his paintings, then hand placed them into the bigger image.

“When you photograph something in three dimensions, that’s not a point of view because it’s round,” he said. “It only becomes a point of view when I place them in there. And I place every figure carefully. Each one was photographed separately. The faces are just a little bit blurred because faces move a little bit.”

“I think this is the future of photography because it’s less flat, isn’t it?” he added.

The English video artist Tacita Dean, in the foreword to the Gray exhibition catalog, elaborates:

“The recent series, of what David calls photographic drawings, radicalizes the picture plane in a way that is utterly new, especially within the medium most associated with verisimilitude that is photography,” she writes. “Something extraordinary has happened. David appears to have found space within a singular two-dimensional image where everyone else has stopped looking. Of the studio, and born out of the studio, these new works break painting and photography free …”

Even if they are confounding to your sense of visual tradition, there is no denying that these images draw you in, make your eyes dance around, seeking information, or maybe a moment of familiarity. They are worth making the effort to visit.

Here are a few more highlights of the interview with Hockney:

On seeing the Kerry James Marshall retrospective “Mastry,” at MOCA Los Angeles: “That was really good. That pulls you in. His work pulls you in. That was the best show I’ve seen at MOCA in Los Angeles.”

On cigarettes and longevity, artistic and otherwise: “I’m still working. I’m producing probably more than I’ve ever done now. And I’m still excited by it. I think that’s what keeps me going, having something to do. That’s what kept Picasso going. Even though I smoke. Picasso smoked, I’ve pointed out. He died at 92. Monet smoked. He died at 86. Matisse smoked. Renoir. Loads of people smoke. I don’t know what they’re going on about.”

On the limits of virtual reality: “Virtual reality, I’m not really that impressed with. I think it will be good for pornography, where you need volume for (breasts) and (buttocks) and that. But you’re not there, really. You have no hands, really.”

On the possible end of abstraction: “Abstraction I think was necessary in Europe. But it wasn’t necessary in China or Japan. Because they always understood what abstraction was. I think abstraction in Europe was probably because of the photograph. They saw what would happen to shadows and things, and I think that’s why abstraction was needed in Europe. But it now might be over. I don’t know. It might be. Certainly everything’s an abstraction on a flat surface, really, even the photograph.”

On his emergence as a style icon: “I always was a bit of a dandy. My father was a bit of a dandy. He always had his suits made, but he never had any money. The last time I asked for money from my parents, I got a postal order for half a crown, which was about 50 cents. I thought, ‘Well, you’re on your own, David.’ I now realize that was a great advantage for me. Because I know people who’ve been waiting for money from their parents, and they’re wasting their lives, aren’t they?”

On ego: “I have an artist’s vanity. I want my work to be seen, that’s all. I don’t have to be seen. That’s the vanity of an artist. They all want their work to be seen, don’t they? I mean, you wouldn’t do it if you didn’t.”